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Distributions of cognates in Europe as based on Levenshtein distance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2011

JOB SCHEPENS ,
TON DIJKSTRA  and
FRANC GROOTJEN
JOB SCHEPENS*
Affiliation:
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
TON DIJKSTRA*
Affiliation:
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
FRANC GROOTJEN
Affiliation:
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Job Schepens/Ton Dijkstra, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands[email protected]
Address for correspondence: Job Schepens/Ton Dijkstra, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands[email protected]
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Abstract

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of six European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Semantic equivalence was determined using the conceptual structure of a translation database. By using a similarity threshold, large numbers of cognates could be selected that nearly completely included the stimulus materials of experimental studies. The identified numbers of form-similar and identical cognates correlated highly with branch lengths of phylogenetic language family trees, supporting the usefulness of the new measure for cross-language comparison. The normalized Levenshtein distance function can be considered as a new formal model of cross-language orthographic similarity.

Keywords

Levenshtein distancecognateorthographic similaritylanguage family
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment , January 2012 , pp. 157 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

In our study, we used the standard input–output functions of the following translation database: Euroglot professional 5.0 (2008), developed by Linguistic Systems B.V. We are grateful to Walter van Heuven, Gerard Kempen, Frank Leoné, Steven Rekké, Bastiaan du Pau, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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